Finance Marketing Benchmarks to Help Prepare for 2027

Financial decisions are amongst the most considered decisions people make in their lifetime.

Potential customers can spend weeks researching mortgages, loans, investment opportunities, insurance policies, pensions or other financial products and services, comparing providers, reading reviews, speaking to advisers and returning across multiple devices before they finally apply. 

By the time an online conversion happens, many of the touchpoints that influenced the decision happened too long ago to be factored into traditional click-based attribution models.

If you’re relying on GA4 and ad platform data to make budget decisions, you’re likely making those decisions on an incomplete picture, and the benchmarks below help explain why.

We cover:

• Traffic share vs conversion share by channel
• Forms versus calls
• Conversion rate by channel
• Ad spend benchmarks

💡 TLDR

• Direct traffic claims the largest share of conversions in finance (34.0%) despite driving only 25.6% of sessions, a gap that points to it picking up value for groundwork done earlier by other channels.

• Phone calls convert at a noticeably higher rate than forms across most channels, yet forms still make up the majority of submitted enquiries, which says a lot about how differently customers want to engage depending on where they are in their research.

• Paid search remains the most cost-efficient channel on a cost per conversion basis, while paid social platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube carry a much heavier price tag per result, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing once you look at what those channels are actually being asked to do.

• Taken together, the numbers point to a familiar theme for anyone marketing financial services, that the channels doing the most visible work at the point of conversion are rarely the whole story.

Traffic share and conversion share

For this analysis, a conversion means a considered action with high-intent, such as a phone enquiry, lead submission, application start, quote request, callback request or appointment booking.

Direct traffic is the standout figure in this table, and not just because it accounts for 34.0% of conversions while representing 25.6% of sessions. Roughly a quarter of website sessions are reported as Direct, but still accounting for a third of conversions, and that kind of pattern usually suggests that some activity from other channels is being recorded as direct. 

Someone typing a brand’s URL straight into their browser, or clicking a saved bookmark, has usually been influenced by something else first, whether that’s a paid social ad they saw weeks ago, an email newsletter, or something offline. 

The problem is that those earlier interactions aren’t always captured when someone eventually returns through direct, meaning the influence of those channels can disappear from the data while direct ends up looking more important than it really is.

Email drives 8.7% of conversions from just 7.0% of sessions, which suggests the audience being emailed is already warmer than an average website visitor. 

This aligns with how financial products and services are usually acquired; people search for a product or service, submit their details to see products and services that are suitable for them, get nurtured over weeks or months, and convert once they’re ready to proceed, rather than submitting applications or complete enquiries on the first visit.

Organic and paid search between them account for just over half of both sessions and conversions, which makes sense given where they typically sit in the journey. Search tends to capture people who are further along in their research, actively looking for a specific product or provider rather than being introduced to the idea for the first time, so it’s natural that these two channels carry a heavier share of both traffic and conversions than channels doing an earlier, more introductory job. 

Social organic and social paid both show a lower share of conversions than sessions, which is exactly what you’d expect for channels that are typically doing an awareness or consideration job rather than a direct response one. That doesn’t mean the spend isn’t working, it usually means the impact is showing up somewhere else in the journey, several steps and often several weeks before the eventual conversion.

💡 Pro Tip

Long, multi-step journeys like these are exactly why it helps to look at measurement as a whole rather than channel by channel. We put together a guide on unified measurement in finance that looks at bringing different methodologies together to build a fuller picture of what’s actually driving performance and what to do next. It’s a useful read if you’re dealing with long consideration windows, customers who convert online but continue their journey to revenue offline, or upper funnel and offline channels that clearly influence outcomes but are hard to attribute a click to.

Read the guide on unified measurement in finance

Share of forms versus calls

Forms still dominate over calls by a wide margin, but it’s worth acknowledging the fact that calls still account for nearly a quarter of all conversions, at 23.9%. 

That’s not a volume of activity any finance marketer can afford to leave out of their reporting. If call conversions aren’t being tracked and attributed back to the campaigns and keywords that drove them, budget decisions end up being made on a partial view of what’s actually working, one that underweights whichever channels are better at generating phone enquiries.

It matters just as much what happens with that data once it’s captured. Feeding call conversions back into ad platforms as offline conversions gives their bidding algorithms a much fuller picture of what a genuine result looks like, rather than optimising purely towards form fills. 

Without that signal, platforms have less information to work with when deciding where to allocate spend, so they optimise towards the conversion types they can see and may underinvest in the campaigns, keywords or audiences actually driving the phone enquiries behind almost a quarter of all conversions.

💡 Pro Tip

We worked with a finance brand who took exactly this kind of joined up approach,using first party tracking and connecting CRM and revenue data from third party payment platforms back to marketing channels. By feeding real offline revenue back into Google Ads and other ad platforms, they built a single source of truth for performance, increased unified ROAS from 1.0x to 1.98x, and grew revenue by 6x.

Read the full case study

Share of forms versus calls by channel

The channel breakdown here tells a more nuanced story than the industry average alone. 

Organic search and paid search both show a noticeably higher proportion of calls compared with other channels, at 30.3% and 24.4% respectively. Both channels tend to capture people actively searching with intent, often with a specific question in mind, which makes them more likely to pick up the phone rather than fill in a form and wait.

It’s also worth remembering that this table only reflects conversions that happen through a tracked online channel in the first place. Some of the most valuable financial conversions never start that way at all. Customers speak to advisers, visit branches, arrange appointments or call a contact centre before becoming a customer, sometimes bypassing digital channels altogether if they’re already an existing customer. 

When those offline conversions aren’t connected back to the marketing that influenced them, digital campaigns can look less effective than they actually are, while the offline conversions themselves appear to happen independently of any marketing at all. 

Tracking calls, form submissions, applications and adviser enquiries through a single first party record that follows the customer from their first visit through to a completed application helps close that gap, and because it’s first party rather than reliant on third party cookies, it holds up better as tracking continues to get harder across the industry.

Direct, email, referral, social organic and social paid all sit above 90% forms, which fits the pattern of lower intent, more passive discovery channels where a form is the natural next step rather than a call.

Finance conversion rates by channel

Email leads the way at 7.2%, reinforcing the earlier point that nurtured, already engaged audiences convert at a higher rate than cold traffic. Referral follows at 6.6%, which makes sense given that a recommendation from a trusted source, whether that’s a comparison site, a partner, or word of mouth, tends to arrive with a level of trust already built in.

Social organic and social paid both convert well below the average, at 1.6% and 3.8%. On their own, those numbers might look like underperformance, but conversion rate alone is a fairly blunt instrument for judging a channel that’s often doing an earlier job in the funnel. 

A customer scrolling social media isn’t usually in an active buying mindset, they’re being introduced to a product or reminded one exists, and the actual application often happens later through a completely different channel. 

This is exactly the kind of situation where data driven attribution, blending click path data with impression weightings, becomes useful, because it shifts value away from the channels that happen to close the deal and towards the ones that started the conversation in the first place, even when that influence never resulted in a click.

Ad spend benchmarks in finance

Google and Bing paid search sit in a league of their own on cost per conversion, at £34.07 and £34.15 respectively, and it’s not a coincidence that search also carries the most direct intent of any channel in this list. 

Someone searching for a mortgage broker or an ISA provider has usually already decided they want that product, they’re just choosing who to give their business to, so it stands to reason that search converts efficiently and cheaply relative to everything else.

The picture changes considerably once you move into social and video. YouTube’s cost per conversion of £683.75 and LinkedIn’s £534.28 look eye watering next to search, but taken in isolation those figures can be misleading. 

Both platforms are generally being used for a different job, building awareness, reaching a specific professional audience, or supporting a brand campaign, rather than capturing existing demand. Judging a channel like YouTube purely on last click cost per conversion is a bit like judging a billboard on how many people scanned a QR code standing underneath it, it misses most of what the channel is actually contributing.

This is where the case for statistical modelling across every channel, including offline media like TV, radio and out of home alongside digital, becomes hard to ignore. Marketing mix modelling that accounts for seasonality, competitor activity and diminishing returns across the full channel mix gives a much clearer read on incremental impact than cost per conversion ever can on its own. 

For finance specifically, where demand shifts with interest rates, regulatory changes and seasonal borrowing patterns, being able to forecast forward as well as look back matters just as much as understanding what’s already happened. 

Modelling different budget scenarios before committing spend, and identifying where each channel is approaching the point of diminishing returns, makes it a good deal easier to decide where the next pound is best spent, particularly when budgets are tight and every channel is asking for a bigger slice.

Bringing it all together

None of these benchmarks are meant to be read as a verdict on which channels are good or bad. What they show, fairly consistently, is that the channels doing the most visible work at the point of conversion, direct traffic, forms, paid search, aren’t necessarily the ones doing the most important work overall. 

Financial customers take their time, move across platforms, sometimes go offline entirely, and rarely convert on the channel that first caught their attention.

Getting a fuller picture usually comes down to a few practical things, tracking calls and forms and applications from the same first party record, comparing more than one attribution model rather than defaulting to last click, connecting offline and adviser conversions back to the marketing that led to them, and modelling the channels that build awareness with the same rigour as the ones that close the deal. 

None of it needs to happen all at once, but even one or two of those changes tends to shift how a finance marketing budget gets allocated.

If you’d like to see how this kind of tracking and attribution could work against your own data, we’re happy to walk you through it. Book a demo with Ruler whenever it suits, no pressure, just a chance to see what your own numbers might reveal.